How American Beer Became Great Again

I recently came across the headline “Number of U.S. Brewers Exceeds
3,000“, a level suspected last seen in the 1870′s. This
statistic is another piece of anecdotal evidence that beer’s
heyday–in the U.S.–occurred well before prohibition, followed by
its dark ages in the 60′s, 70′s and 80′s. With the American beer
industry now entering its age of enlightenment, I wanted to find
a simple way to tell the whole story that wasn’t a one-off
statistic.

Enter the Beer Institute.

The Beer Institute publishes an annual brewers almanac chock full of
raw data dating all the way back to the late 1800′s. Using
this resource I was able to produce a chart that I think clearly
shows the trends in the U.S. beer industry since 1887.

In 1887 the U.S. had 2,269 brewers producing on average 10,190
barrels of beer per year. I suspect there were a large
number of small local brewers producing a lot of great
beer.

Even before Prohibition the number of brewers in the U.S. began
to slide. I imagine there were many reasons for this including
improved shipment methods, allowing some of these smaller brewers
to extend their reach, acquiring or putting less successful
brewers out of business. What this means is while
Prohibition was a catalyst to moving beer toward its Dark Ages,
it was not the cause.

This trend rapidly worsened and by 1979 we had just 44 brewers in
the U.S. producing on average over 4 million barrels of beer per
year. Beer production shifted from quality to quantity:
good for the brewers, but terrible for the consumers.

Lucky for us today, beer was about to enter its Renaissance.

Beer Advocate has a fantastic timeline illustrating how this
Renaissance was born, but some key events include the
legalization of home brewing in 1978, the first ever Great
American Beer Festival in 1981 and the birth of the brewpub in
1982.

Today, while craft beer still makes up a relatively small amount
of market share there has been an obvious shift back to quality.
As of 2012–the most recent almanac data–there are 2,751
breweries operating in the U.S., producing on average 71,152
barrels of beer; 98% below the 1979 level. While we will
never know what we missed in the late 1800′s, if you are a fan of
beer, now isn’t a bad time to be alive.